Divine Intervention
by SRu
Summary: 1996 was a bad year for Lydecker.


Divine Intervention  
  
Disclaimer: Dark Angel isn't mine, 'It's a Wonderful Life' isn't mine, and neither is 'A Christmas Carol.' Watch the show, watch the movie, and go read the book.  
  
  
The leftover fall leaves didn't even make a sound under her feet. The row of little houses were all quiet at this hour of the night. Some of the more elaborate Christmas lights were blinking on and off, and the lights on the next block over were smeared and hazy in the fog.  
  
Sarge was at her elbow. They stood in the shadow of one of the larger trees, and the yellow of the streetlights turned their gray-and-white cammo into just some more shadows in the mist.  
  
"What's your mission?" he asked, in a whisper that hardly carried even in the light fog.  
  
"Secure the area," she repeated from her briefing. He nodded, so she continued. "Locate the subject."  
  
"And?"  
  
"Whatever it takes." She felt the same tension that she always had before a performance, way back when.   
  
"You'll be fine," he said, and tapped her shoulder. Her cammo shimmered into a cloud for a moment, and when she looked down she was wearing a white knit top, and jeans faded to a pale, acid-washed blue. Her boots were missing.  
  
"This is the first time I've worn jeans since I died," she thought as she watched Sarge fade out, wings first, chevrons last. She felt a little puff of breeze from his take-off, and knew he'd be watching from overhead.  
  
A few steps to cross the street, and her hand was on the doorknob of the third house from the end, the one with no Christmas lights, and shrubbery that needed prunining. She thought about a key, and the knob turned silently open. She let herself smile just a bit- if she hadn't been able to open the door, she would have needed to walk through it.  
  
The living room was bachelor chic - bare of decoration. Just the white walls, wood floor, the TV set, and a six-foot tall piece of tree with throwing knives sticking in it. The plaid couch looked like some sort of animal had been gnawing on it. "Reminds me of Dek's place before we got married," she thought.  
  
She glided silently into the kitchen. "This must be my subject," she thought, examining the man sprawled face-down on the floor. "Poor bastard. If there was anyone around to help him out, the Boss wouldn't have sent me in."  
  
She nudged his shoulder with her bare foot. The man twitched a little, so she pushed harder. "Le' m' lone," he protested.  
  
"Wrong answer," she thought, but didn't say. She rolled him over onto his back.  
  
***  
  
Lydecker woke up with a woman's foot on his chest, pressing him back onto the tile floor. The kitchen ceiling seemed to sway over his head, until he managed to focus on a familiar face.  
  
"Angel!" he yelped. "I'm dead." She put her foot back on the floor, and the tiniest swing of her hips caught his eye. He'd forgotten how she moved. She was a dancer, perfect muscles, perfect motion, elegant down to the bone. Photos of her were always wrong, and too still. Photos were all he'd seen for almost two years now.  
  
"Not you. Me." She shook her head, her curls swinging. She leaned towards him, put her hands on her knees. "You know, I kept telling myself that you were going to be fine without me. That you would cope. This is sort of an unpleasant surprise."   
  
"I didn't have much time for drinking with you around," he told her. "It took lots of time and energy to keep you happy."  
  
The corners of her mouth turned up, and he got to watch her blush. He knew from experience that the pink would be spreading down her neck, onto her chest, and out towards her nipples. Once upon a time, he would have carried her to the nearest horizontal surface. . . . He missed her terribly, and wondered where this hallucination was coming from.  
  
"Time to see exactly how trashed I am," he thought. He sat up, and waited for things to stop swirling around him.  
  
When he looked up again, she was crouched in a tremendously elegant, artistic pose. The relaxed curve of her arm lead down to an empty bottle on the floor. Her other hand held a small, cylindrical, amber colored plastic bottle. "The down side of an expressive face," he thought. Her lower lip was trembling, and her chocolate eyes were fixed on him.   
  
"How many of these did you take?" she asked. She held the little bottle with the tension that he'd use for a weapon. When she tipped it towards him so he could see the little warning stickers, he felt the gesture like a knife in the ribs.  
  
"Enough."   
  
"You couldn't get anyone else to kill you, so you do it yourself." A tear slid down next to her nose.   
  
"There is a disciplinary hearing tomorrow, Angel. My career is over." His stomach knotted just thinking about it. He'd been less nervous about crossing mine fields. "I can't talk my way out of this one."  
  
"You know, I finally figured out why you would go when you got those calls in the middle of the night. The phone would ring, and a half an hour later you would be kissing me good-bye." She set the two empty bottles next to each other on the tile, and leaned against the cupboard under the sink. She wrapped her arms around her legs, and tipped her head to one side. The line of her neck against her dark hair fixed his attention.  
  
"I had a job in records. It was fun. I got to keep track of little boys helping Grandma across the street, stuff like that.  
  
"Then one day, the Boss calls. He says 'I need you.' He says 'No one else can do the job. Report for training.' So I say 'Good bye' to the girls in records, and spend six months in training." She tucked her feet under herself, and rested her hands on her knees.  
  
"So, for my first assignment, I get the single most stubborn person I have ever met. I'll be going back to records. I'm not going to get wings, I'm not going to get the white beret. The Boss is going to call me on the carpet. He's going to ask why I'm a waste of training, and equipment, and what I have to say for myself."  
  
"Angel, I have no future."   
  
"I'll show you future!" She got to her feet in one liquid motion. He saw the windup for the punch, but was too surprised to think about blocking it.  
  
***  
  
Thirty nine-year-old kids stood in neat rows, at attention. Military haircuts and fatigues matched the posture. The last of the twilight was fading, and they cast hard shadows under the bright lights.  
  
"Something's wrong," thought Lydecker, watching from cover through the two fences, the razor wire, and past the guard tower at the corner of the yard. Armed men were patrolling in the space between the fences, and he thought he saw the signs of machine guns placed in the tower. This was all out of proportion for a bunch of kids.  
  
He carefully evaluated the closest of the group, a sandy-haired boy who was a bit taller and stockier than the others. The boy's face was an odd shape. His jaw was too narrow and pointed, and seemed too long for the rest of his face. The boy's ears twitched, and Lydecker noticed that they were pointed, and had tufts of blond fur at the tips.  
  
The boy tipped his head back and howled. Lydecker thought of dogs, then the other kids joined in. "Sounds like a pack of wolves."  
  
The howls cut off suddenly, an the formation dispersed at impossible speed. The children threw themselves on the guards. Mouths opened wide, displaying the pointed canines of carnivores. The unlucky guards felt teeth on their necks, then nothing. Lydecker cringed at the sheer bloody viciousness of the attack.  
  
Now the wolf-children were leaping the fences. A dark-haired girl was heading towards Lydecker, with two more guards converging on her. She spun, raking her claws across the first, then bringing the second one down with teeth against his throat.  
  
The girl was running again, and she stared at Lydecker with liquid brown eyes. Her ears twitched, and she turned away from him. He could see black lines on the back of her neck – a bar code.  
  
***  
  
He was back on the kitchen floor again, with Angel watching him, her arms folded.  
  
"What the Hell was that?"   
  
"Dek, in 2009, a bunch of genetically enhanced soldiers are going to escape. There is nothing you can do about it."   
  
"That's some stupid civilian's idea of what a soldier is about. No wonder they lost control." He struggled to sit up. For some reason he was feeling light-headed.  
  
"You can't put together a team to fight those things. Those kids will never get caught."  
  
"I can go in on the ground, working from the inside," he said. It made sense to him. "Someone in the project could steer the concept away from carnivores that run in packs."  
  
She took his hand in both of hers, and pressed it to her face. "She's still wearing the ring," he thought, seeing the gold band on her finger. She kissed his fingertips.  
  
When she dropped his hand, it was as if a puppet's strings were cut. He held his head off the floor for just long enough to see her take two steps away from him on a take-off run. Perfect white wings carried her up through the ceiling like it didn't exist.  
***  
  
Lydecker woke up, face down on the kitchen floor. The pounding headache reminded him of just how much alcohol still had to work its way out of his blood stream.  
  
"It's a really bad nightmare when waking up in your own vomit is an improvement." He shuddered as he remembered flashes of wolf-children running through the woods. Most of the dream was just a blur.  
  
"Angel was trying to tell me something," he thought. "I've got to pull myself together."  
  
***  
Donald Michael Lydecker checked his dress uniform carefully in the mirror. Each bit of insignia was exactly where it was supposed to be.  
  
"One last time," he said to himself. "I'm going to do this right."  
  
"Something's still missing." He found the wedding ring in the back corner of his sock drawer.  
  
He turned it in the morning sunlight, and read the inscription "Angel loves Dek 11-25-88" engraved around the inside of the ring. There was a picture of feather scribed into the gold. He wondered why he hadn't noticed that before.  
  
He slipped the ring on his finger, and for the first time in a long while, he felt like he was doing the right thing.  
  
"Time to face the music." 


End file.
